I’ve often wondered why forums never took off at any of the companies I’ve worked at. Has anyone else worked at companies that had forums?
All I worked at had email and chat, and some had wikis, but never forums, despite having crucial advantages over email (anyone who joins later can search them) and wikis (they’re conversations rather than mutable, outdated documents) and chat (they can’t interrupt you).
Forums is fundamentally community based, where everyone is expected to pitch in. While companies are socials, there's not a lot of community going around. There are projects, but the deciders form a very small subset of the involved people.
By the way, for email, the etiquette would be to include the context of the discussion in the invitation for the new person coming in. Or send the archive of the discussion to the person. But for the latter to happen would require a much better email client than what most people are using.
We used Stack Overflow for Teams, but when the first batch of questions got asked and reacted to, the activity subdued quickly.
Some time after that we somehow got locked out of our account and it was deemed not worth the hassle to try to get it back.